Dr. KatalinPécsi is an essayist and a lecturer in the field
of contemporary Jewish literature and film and numerous issues related to
the Holocaust and Jewish women’s literature.

She is the Director of
Education at the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation
Center in Budapest. She is a co-founder of Esther's Bag
(Esztertáska)- a small, but energetic Jewish women's group
which contributes to the recovery of the lost world of Jewish women and to
make these women visible in the male-centered Jewish culture.

I. Holocaust and
Gender

Two years ago, when I gave a
lecture about a similar topic in Budapest, the lecture’s title and
introduction made my mostly male audience quite indignant. Why do I want to
polarize the Holocaust-experience as a male-female question, and
perhaps suggest that women suffered more, or behaved better?,
they asked. How can I have the audacity to “measure suffering”? And
on what basis do I dare to state that the most well-known and famous
Holocaust-narratives do not always talk about the “general human aspects”,
but are mostly about male experiences?

Many thought that even the
question I posed was strange, forced, or downright suspicious: why would
women have lived through different things and in different ways than
men? And even if women survivors had things to tell, too, who kept them back
from writing their own memoirs? (A more sophisticated partner in this
dispute, one who does not brush the very topic away immediately, may add
that I was wrong even in my basic assumption, namely that for decades,
male experience dominated the formation of the general human
Holocaust-narrative: we have Anna Frank’s diaries, don’t we…)

Indeed, nothing shows it
better than this diary, which has become a bestseller, that the “gendering”
of the Holocaust-experience can be productive! Anna Frank’s writingis so exciting for the already two generations grown up after the
Holocaust because she talks about her small, human, everyday problems and
joys. While we are reading what she wrote, we become friends with the
adolescent “hero” and “narrator.” That is, this narrative is deeply
humane. (Is this what men call “the bottom view of history?”)

If we look at our bookshelves,
we won’t find many woman authors next to our books by Primo Levi, Imre
Kertész, Améry, Bettelheim, Kosinczki, Semprun and Borowski.
(Although this question can be brought up about the whole world literature
ingeneral, too.) It was Saul
Friedlander[i]
who articulated, a few years ago, that the “master narrative” emerging from
the many Holocaust stories we know that we have been getting the male
viewpoint: men’s experiences and memories became the "norm”.

II. Women about the Holocaust

Laughing a lot, my
grandmother used to tell me the same stories: how she smuggled a message
from the convict station they were gathered in, asking her little sister for
summer dresses, since she will need them desperately in the labor camp…. The
great story after they got released: with the help of a list her son found
my grandmother in the camp, but she did not want to get off her wooden bunk
to have a look at the young man asking for her, since she was just about to
go to the dentist, her face swollen – she did not want any man to see her in
a state like that… (We, her teenager grandchildren, were of course grinning
candidly: our grandmother, though well in her years, was still an
acknowledged, proud lady…

As I grew up, I always hoped
to find women’s Holocaust-stories similar to those of my grandmother’s.
Thanks to the historians and psychologists we have known about the
importance of oral history for quite a while: we know that women’s
narratives have another point of view and mood. The researchers collecting
stories about the Holocaust have realized that women tell different stories
in a different way. For this reason, it would be really important to come to
know their narratives as well, not only the ones told by men, independent of
gender and considered as universal for all victims.

Looking around in a bookshop
in any Holocaust Museum in the world you can find a great number of books
written by women. The Hungarian publishers are not really interested yet in
their memoirs, as they don’t consider these memoirs as “real literature” –
though they might be priceless “treasuries”.

Aranka Siegal[ii],
born in
Beregszász, publishing as an American, wanted originally nothing more
than just to bear witness to what happened to her, struggling with her
memories as well as with the English language. But her two books written
about the deportation, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and her vicissitudes
after the war became bestsellers in many countries, praising the author as
the “Hungarian Anna Frank”, although the books are not based on a real or
fictive diary.

Another "Anna Frank”,
Edith Bruck had first moved to Israel, then settled down and became
famous in Italy. Her book “Ki téged úgy szeret” (“Who loves you like this”)[iii]
is based on her autobiography: it shows the story of a girl, telling us
about her growing up in a poor peasant family, about the deportation, the
impossibility of returning home and her struggles getting to and in Israel.

The Holocaust was a taboo as
a Jewish topic in Hungary for decades, and although now and again there was
a book published, I presume that we, children of survivors, tried to put
together the mosaics from the newly published books by Semprun and
Peter Weiss, and not from the memoirs of our parents’ Hungarian
contemporaries. Although quite a few personal memoirs had been published
directly after the war, they did not become well known for some reason – so
they did not become part of the Jewish canon either. [iv]

Well, these first stories
told by Jews – by Jewish women! – were unknown to the next generation,
growing up, just like the “Jewish” novels or “novels with a Jewish motive”
from the second wave, published almost at the same time, in the middle of
the seventies. (The same happened to Imre Kertész: his novel,
Fateless, was published in 1975. It was then deliberately held back.[v]

My most recent example about
the disinterest of both publishers and the “people of books” is a brilliant
woman’s Holocaust memoir, which was published in 1994, but I have never seen
it in bookstores.[vi]
I ran into it by accident in the basement storeroom of my new workplace, the
Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest. Its author, Judith Magyar
Isaacson was born in a Hungarian town, Kaposvár, into an
assimilated Jewish family. She was a young girl when she and her family were
taken to Auschwitz. Her memoir is one of the most harrowing and powerful
books written by a woman about the Holocaust, but its publication went still
quite unnoticed in the country where she was born. Many people read it in
the US, and it has been published in German as well.

A gender-focused examination does not aim at measuring who suffered more: a
mother or a father who lost a child.[vii]
And it does not intend to “divide” victims either, when it treats the
experiences and the memoirs of men and women separately.

We also see the “group” itself as more “differentiated” today: we know that
neither the categories of “men” and “women”, nor the category of “Jews” are
homogenous. We can talk not only about men and women, but also about
religious and secular, Zionist and assimilated Jews. About people who lived
in smaller towns and those who lived in bigger cities. Sefarad and
Ashkenazi, poor and wealthy people, belonging to these smaller groups or
categories, assume different experiences and ways of life.

III. Why have women
stayed in the background?

Literature has traditionally
been a “male territory.” “Women appeared as professional writers only very
late, and because of this, histories of literature are usually thought of as
a history passed on from fathers to sons. Because of this, the
literary canon consists of works mostly written by men. This shaped the
tradition according to which the author is almost always a man (or if she
happens to be a woman biologically, then she ceases to function as a woman
in society).” Thus it is self-evident that the literary tradition – as
gender-focused literary theory has pointed out – “lacks patterns for women:
a maternal line of descent.”[viii]

Of course, not only
publishers can be blamed for the lack of women – but women writers
themselves, too.

Before WW II, Hungarian
women writers of Jewish origin did not identify themselves as such [ix]and since the Holocaust, new generations of women writers have again
been unwilling to write about their Jewish and/or women’s identity. So the
female side of the East-Central European Jewish existence is absent from the
general Jewish narrative.

East of the Elbe gender
is as problematic as ethnicity. During the first – communist period
of feminism, - women were told that they were “emancipated” and “equal” in
society and were therefore not expected to behave or express themselves in
any way different from men. An important reason, why Communism declared
feminist self-expression unnecessary was that it considered it a danger for
the regime. The situation of Jewish women was further aggravated by the old
Jewish fear of being “different.” Mimicry, the art of superficial
resemblance – a semblance of assimilation, the attempt to be invisible as
Jews, regardless of what they actually felt in their heart or intellect, or
might even discuss among groups of intimate friends whom they could trust –
was necessary for the survival of the Jews. To a certain degree this same
mimicry was useful for women writers as well, and is still necessary today
in a world in which acts of segregation are still more dominant than acts of
unification.

IV. Feminine subject,
feminine speech

In women’s writings about
the Holocaust, new topics appear, which until now have not been
among the canonized literary topics: besides the themes of physical
and psychological defenselessness and the dread of terror, new narratives
have been born about solidarity and friendship between women.[x]

Women’s Holocaust-narratives
have an overwhelming force: but what makes their effect different
from the works written by men, that is, according to the “canon”?

Talking about a feminine
way of seeing and narration, we have to raise two questions:

1.Did women survivors of the
Holocaust have different experiences (as well) from their male companions?

2.Do women talk about their
“experiences” in a different way from male narrators?

Nazi ideology is
characterized not only by racism, but also by sexism,: the idea that
men are superior to women.[xi]

Because of the racial and
sexual superiority of the Nazis (apparent both in their ideology and
propaganda) Jewish women were targeted doubly. They were subjects of hatred
not only as Jews, but as mothers and sexual beings, too.
(Jewish children were regarded as “enemies”, thus being pregnant counted
as a crime against the Empire.)[xii]

Nudity makes men
dehumanized – and women de-feminized. Women were more defenseless
bodily: and the body is also that which shapes gender identity.We
cannot neglect that in their Holocaust memoirs, these testimonies,woman is the metaphor of the Victim, and the role of female
body can be traced as “both a catalyst and site of remembrance” - as
Karen Remmler says.[xiii]

Pregnancy, induced abortion, sterilization, missing menstruation or giving
birth in a
camp are experiences that were added to the terror everyone had to suffer.
Women soon ceased to be “women” in the hell they had gotten into; and we
know of many survivors who could never restore a positive relationship to
the “woman inside”.[xiv]
At the same time, those women who had children, had to gather all the
strength they had to be able to stand strong as mothers, to defend and help
their children.

They had also different
chances to survive: pregnant women and women with young children were
usually sent to the gas chambers at the very first selection. (On the other
hand, women are better at bearing things and suffering; they have hundreds
of years of practice, and this increased their chance of survival.)

Most of the women who
survived remained silent throughout their lives. They never talked about
being humiliated, raped, or forced into prostitution. There are experiences
that could never be told, their memories preserved. Therefore, these traumas
are culturally not represented. (What it was like to come back from the
lager without one’s child or children – and never to talk about it, to
mention just one.) We do not know the memories of female capos
either: we only know what fellow prisoners have told us in their memoirs.
(As women’s memoirs testify, sometimes the prisoners felt sympathy for, and
sometimes even a kind of solidarity with the Jewish women capos. Judit
Magyar Isaacson managed to avoid becoming a capo but she did not blame the
woman who accepted the position. On the other hand, one day Edith Bruck’s
capo showed her, – with an almost friendly gesture – that she should look
for her mother in the smoke coming from the crematorium.)

Being
raped
– that only happened to other
women;
but almost all women’s memoirs talk about the dread of male violence, the
fear of being raped by SS soldiers and male capos or of being taken with the
“girl transport” to the Russian front, or the fear of being raped by the
liberating soldiers.[xv]
"Thousands
of women were raped during the war, but no one hears about
them”. “Those Anne Franks who survived the rape don’t write their stories”.[xvi]

Hiding with false
identification papers, in houses protected by foreign embassies, in the
ghetto or a concentration camp, women had to fight for their daily survival
alone: they had to take on male tasks and roles. However, they worked
out strategies that were different from those of men: they cooperated more,
and it seems that they formed stronger spiritual bonds with their mates.
(Many memoirs show that not only family members supported each other, but,
being dependent on one another, new “mother-daughter-sister”
relationships were formed, too.[xvii])

Thus we have to examine what
kind of “feminine topics”, values, ways of behavior appear in the narratives
of surviving women.

In what follows, I will talk
about a few women’s memoirs: the examples I have chosen show that when women
talk about their bodies, the loss of their hair or the clothes they were
wearing in camps, they do not simply elevate “small”, seemingly less
remarkable themes into the great topmost of suffering, but also enhance the
expressive force of these: each motif has a meaning behind itself,
and thus what cannot be expressed, still becomes somehow representative.

My first example shows how
the women who published their recollections depict – with a fine, seemingly
small, but all the more powerful, allusive motif – the moment when
they realized that their fate was irreversible. Aranka Siegal depicts the
moment when her mother baked the last bread in a way that cannot be
forgotten: up until that moment, the leaven put aside for the next
weekend had been passed on by mothers to daughters, from generation to
generation…[xviii]

“ …Mother turned her
flour sack upside down to bake the last of the flour into bread. ‘ I am not
going to bother to save the growing yeast for the next baking’ – she said.
‘There is no next. This is the last of our flour, and who will be here to
bake bread’”

As Edith Bruck remembers:
her mother did not explain to her children why they had to be afraid, but
she sent her daughter up onto the attic with the pots they used only at
Passover, and made the remark that they would probably not use them any
more, anyway. Neither of them describes violence in a direct way: they
both use the technique of omission.

“Wearing nice dresses”
can metonymically express the sharp difference between the “happy times of
peace” and the era of exclusion: Aranka Siegal from Beregszász and
Judit Magya Isaacson from Kaposvár[xix]
both recall how nice “Hungarian” dresses they wore as girls; Judit Magyar
writes about how she had been honored by having been chosen to recite a
patriotic poem at a school commemoration. However, the continuation
immediately shows that the “Hungarian dress” was just a costume, to maintain
an illusion: Judit Magyar’s 15th March recital was interrupted by
the shouts of her anti-Semitic classmates; and Aranka Siegal only counted as
“Hungarian” in Sub-Carpathia, until she, as an enthusiastic member of the
Hungarian minority, greeted Horthy – not much later, the “Hungarians” did
not consider her a Hungarian any more, and sent her whole family into death.

Judit Magyar, who, as a
teenage girl, was quite responsive to feminine patterns, kept
watching whom she liked or disliked even in the cattle wagon: she gives a
detailed description of young women’s hairstyles, or their skin. Arriving at
Auschwitz, the sensitive girl is shocked by the nudity and
baldness of women: "Our heads were shaved quite bald. Without hair,
even in women’s clothes everybody looked like men. For two days we couldn’t
get used to it and we always told each other ‘please, Mr or – hello, my
little boy”.[xx]

A “good” dress
obtained in the camp, besides giving more chance to survive, is also a means
of “preening” oneself, and thus helped to keep one’s self-esteem, and
psychologically healthy. "I was enormously proud of that bit of sky-blue
cloth, having outwitted the whole Lager system for it…I sneaked it back to
the lager, hidden under my blouse. I hemmed it with a needle…, I washed it
in ersatz coffee I stole at the risk of my life…”.[xxi]

Judit gets a piece of her
aunt’s dress, then exchanges her bread portion for a needle and sews a
“scarf” for herself, with thread
unrevealed from a blanket.
Or: They (he women – PK) would tare pieces of their long dresses and
cover their heads to look nicer. Women are the strangest people I ever could
imagine, and the most interesting is that I am of the same sort. We were
sewing,, chattering, singing…[xxii]

Cutting women’s hair,
depriving them of this symbol of femininity, is obviously one of the most
awful ways of humiliation. But it is also clear that the momentary meaning
of the situation may also depend on the attitude of the victims. Edith
Bruck[xxiii],
as a rebellious teenager, tried to “take an advantage” of the shock of
losing her hair in the ghetto of Sátoraljaúhely:

"They ordered us to cut our
hair short. (…) I was twelve years old, and I felt sorry for my hair. My
mother’s hand was trembling as she stood there holding the scissors. (…) To
encourage her, I began to laugh. I told her (…) that I would look like a
young lady with short hair. I looked for a mirror, and then I was looking
for my face… But then I persuaded myself that I had become much more
interesting.” And
another hair-related memory, from later on, in the train: "My mother kept
combing and caressing my short hair, and she tried to comfort me: she told
me that I would soon have long hair again, and I would wear it in plates,
decorated with colorful ribbons, as I had used to. She searched through our
few belongings for a miserable little red bow, and attached it to my hair…”

Aranka Siegal,
who had her mother as an accomplice, also tried to transform the humiliation
of having their hair cut into something positive:

"…I wanted to
protest, but looking up at her concerned face, I could understand that she
had to do it…I bit my lips and listened to the squeaking sound of the shears
as they clipped away my damp hair ... After she (my mother) finished, she
combed it all through several times, then got up and told me to stand up...
She pulled a small hand mirror from her apron pocket and gave it to me.
"Take a look. I think this length suits your face. It makes you look more
grown-up, don’t you think?” …I relaxed my teeth and tasted blood…”I like
it”, I said to Mother.

"I think Judi will like it,
too. It is more like what she calls ’modern’…”Oh, Piri, you look so stylish
with your modern haircut”, Mother exclaimed, mimicking Judi’s flamboyant way
of speaking…”[xxiv]

Another topic to explore
would be the mother-daughter relationshipsunder such
difficult conditions. There were mothers who lost heart, and “became like
children” themselves, and there were determined, strong-minded mothers, who
could organize things well, and who tried to make things somehow “normal”.
Aranka Siegal’s mother used sheets to divide the space in a brick factory
into separate “apartments” for privacy and kept urging people to clean
themselves properly. Caring about one another was most important in those
days. Judit Magyar and her mother felt they had to rearrange their barren
room right after the liberation:
"…we transformed our drab room: two mattresses made a corner couch, a pile
of SS blankets served for bedspreads and rugs. Mother placed a brilliant
arrangement of wild flowers on the windowsill”.[xxv]

Of course we see mothers
through their daughters’ eyes – I do not know of any memoir written
from the opposite perspective.

The description of
mother-sister-girlfriend relationships in the camps is also exceptionally
significant because these stories, (partly) about cooperation and partly
about love prove that not only better working conditions, good clothing or
food guaranteed survival. It also indicated that it wasn’t the absolute
truth that physically stronger prisoners had more chance of survival.
Besides this, due to the graphically and sensitively described woman
characters and situations, today’s reader can also understand better that
the Holocaust is not about millions of faceless, completely dehumanized
victims[xxvi].

I don’t know whether
feelings of solidarity were stronger among women than selfishness, or
whether it’s just that women like more to recall those memories that
built, rather than destroyed their personality. According to
Judit Magyar:

“I was quite desolate
sometimes that I know so little about life and people. Now I got it. I
learned very much about both in quite a short time”.[xxvii]

We should not neglect the specifics of writing
either: survivors often wrote what had happened to them right after the
liberation, but their memories were so tormenting and painful that many of
them stopped writing. In other cases, the writers of recollections were not
satisfied with their work, as they felt they were unable to render what they
had gone through, the things they meant to share with the readers. Many
authors rewrote their memoirs years or decades later; and there are always
irreconcilable differences between what the two (or sometimes more)
versions emphasize.[xxviii]

Judit Magyar wrote a short
summary of what had happened to her right after the liberation, in the
autumn of 1945, as an explanation for her American love whom she met during
the liberation, and who became her husband, and for his family. In the end
of the 1980s, she wrote a book, and had already finished it when she came
upon this first version, consisting of only a few pages, among her papers.
Edith Bruck also wrote her recollections immediately after the liberation.
However, her manuscript got lost, and she rewrote the memoir later, in
Italy.

V. The image of women and recollection

Following the male canon, we
are still more or less blind to specifically feminine experiences. During
the last few years, gender has not become a widely accepted point of
view or area of research. At the same time, there are more and more new
books that direct our attention to explicitly and specifically
feminine or masculine experiences. We can hope that after a while the
perspective of gender will lose its peculiarity, just like other points of
view, which had been regarded as odd, but had become self-evidently
productive and significant.[xxix]

We can state that besides
the characteristic thematic specifics of women’s Holocaust experiences (or
besides their characteristic silencing of certain experiences), a
characteristically feminine way of expression has been formed, too,
in women’s narratives.

A special characteristic
feature of women’s Holocaust narratives is the female character. In
the male canon, women are mostly powerless victims, or the emblematic
remains of an older Jewish world. In women’s Holocaust memoirs, however,
these women are the main characters. They are visible and they have
particular, specific features: they respond to oppression, they resist, and
fight.

"Failing
to recognize the gendered nature of women’s suffering, consigns them to
silence and a second un-mourned death”.[xxx]

According to the notes attached to
the novel, the author started to write her autobiographical story at
the end of the year 1945 in Hungary, in her mother tongue. However,
the note-book she wrote it in got lost while fleeing to
Czechoslovakia. She restarted it several times, and eventually wrote
it in 1958-59 in Rome, in Italian. [Back to
essay]

[iv]
Ágnes Zsolt: Éva lányom. Napló. (“My Daughter, Éva. A Diary”)
Új Idők Kiadóvállalata, Budapest, 1947. Mária Ember mentioned the
diary among the authentic reports published immediately after the
war, and György Szőke wrote in detail about the publishing of the
diary, touching upon the suicide of the mother, Ágnes Zsolt.

Teri Gács: A mélységből kiáltunk
hozzád. (“We Call You From The Barathrum”), Emlékezések, Tabor
kiadás, 1946. Teri Gács’s authentic report talks about the
Glasshouse in the Vadász street, where more than five thousand Jews
were harboured. (We know painfully little about the Glasshouse, as
we haven't got the remotest conception for example about the role of
women in the Zionist movements.)

[v]
The first in the row was a novel written by a woman: Ágnes
Gergely’s novel from 1973, A tolmács (“The Interpreter”),
Szépirodalmi, 1973, opened a new chapter, talking about everything
following the deportation – i.e. the possible ways of living for the
Jews after the war: stay or leave? What does Israel/Palestine mean
for the Jewish survivor from Europe? What is the right decision:
assimilation or the self-imposed "ghetto”?[Back to
essay]

It was
followed by Hajtűkanyar ("Hairpin Bend”) by Mária Ember.
(Szépirodalmi,1974.)

Mária Ember tries to show the unshowable from a child’s point of
view – a method often used by the rememberers. It is not only
genuine because the author herself lived through the Holocaust as a
child, but because the viewpoint of a child, being naive and wise at
the same time, stultify the attempts trying to explain and
understand the situation.

From the end of the eighties on, there has been a constant increase
in the number of the publications concerning Jewish themes, but
hardly any of them were written by women. A rare exception is Magda
Székely’s Éden, a thin "talking book”, full of family
photographs. It is actually a memoir, as Magda Székely talks about
her family, childhood, being in exile and in hiding. It is a highly
interesting and moving book.[Back to
essay]

[vi]
Judit Magyar Isaacson: Köszönet az életért, 1993, without the
name of the publisher ("Seed of Sarah”, University of Illinois
Press, 1990.).[Back to
essay]

[vii]
Langer, Lawrence: The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination.
Yale University Press, New Haven; Rosenfeld, Alvin H.: A double
dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Indiana University
Press, Bloomington and Indiana, 1980.[Back to
essay]

[xvii]
I don’t know whether there indeed existed a stronger solidarity
between women than men in camps. However, according to the memoirs I
know, women talk more about this subject. – P.K.[Back to
essay]

[xxii]Judit Magyar, ibi., p.
151. My grandma told me a similar story: it went about how hard it
was to get a needle, but at last she managed it and could embroider
the collar of her uniform with thread unstitched from the seam of a
blanket. She just wanted to look pretty – at the concentration camp
as well…[Back to
essay]

[xxvi]
Ruth Kluger’s reviews a memoir that depicts a similarly interesting
mother-daughter relationship: “Survival at Auschwitz in Landscapes
of Memory”. The Guardian, Saturday March 15, 2003.[Back to
essay]

[xxviii]
Cf. Andrea Pető: "… The author, Mrs. K., has already conquered her
own nightmares in her memoirs: we can all learn a lot from her. Yet
it is exactly the first piece, the most painful one, the one that
was the most difficult to write that we cannot read, and we can see
this as symbolic. We don’t always write about our own fights with
the past, with the shadows of our family, to the wider public. But
it is our task to publish everything that was meant to reach the
wider public. And perhaps we can read all those Shoah memoirs
written by women and for women once in one volume, and reading them
may help many of us to be able to write those ‘very first pieces’.”
“A női holocaust visszaemlékezések” (“Women’s Holocaust Memoirs”).
In: Esztertáska,
www.nextwave.hu/esztertaska[Back to
essay]

[xxix]
One can tell the same about any new perspective in research. Louise
Vasvári, a linguist living in New York, reads the well-known story
of the “taming of the shrew” as a typical narrative of violence
against women. Who would have asked earlier why the audience is
rolling with laughter when the unruly wife is “given a lecture” on
the stage? Another example is the work of Sidra Ezrahi, one
of the most significant researchers of the literature of the
Holocaust. She recalled in a lecture she gave in Budapest, in 2003,
how her professors had been dumbfounded when she announced that she
wanted to write her dissertation about the Holocaust-literature at
the English Department of the Brandeis University: "But there is no
such thing!” We know by now that the study of works of literature,
films and other works of art about the Shoah does not just
signify an external choice of theme and viewpoint.[Back to
essay]